"OS X is full of little design touches that have redefined what people expect from a personal computer, and which complement Apple hardware. In fact, you can't (legally) install the operating system on anything but a Mac, so the two are forever entwined - and that gives Apple advantages that other computer manufacturers simply don't have. Join us as we explore the world's most beautiful operating system and find out how Apple created it." Slightly nauseating hyperbole aside (I find Mac OS X bland and grey thank you very much), it's an interesting article.

Yep It's a bad article unless you love Macs.
There seems to me like there are a heap of incorrect facts in there. I thought to myself "That can't be right" a few times as I read through it.

The article is bad even if you "love" Macs. All the cool stuff is left out like yellow box (and red box speculation) and project marklar, etc... Also, the whole breakthrough w/ the classic environment (rhapsody required a reboot into OS 9) etc, etc, etc...

Why every single damn article about Os X is very much biased? And why all articles about Os X are nothing but commonplace and obvious? And no, I won't waste my time reading another article about Apple and their marvelous OS.

I think the writers title "How Apple created OS X" for the article was a bit ambitious because it did really tell you at all how OS X was created but how the end product looked.
Maybe Gruber should have written it. But that article would probably be thicker than War and peace.

Pretty much. I go back and forth on NextStep vs BeOS as how they were as proto OSX operating systems. For years, I'd come down on the BeOs side. But, looking back at it with some emotional distance, Next was already multi user, and had the solid BSD base. I'm not sure if the fact that NextStep had Jobs was seen as a plus or minus at the time.

I am a registered fanboi. But this article looks like it was written by a junior assistant in the Apple PR department. No, let me retract that, I don't want to insult the junior assistants in the Apple PR department.

"[OS X] gives Apple advantages that other computer manufacturers simply don't have. With Apple's latest MacBook Air, for example, you'll find special keys on the keyboard that link specifically to new functions in OS X Lion, such as Mission Control"

Special keys to launch applications? No! Such innovation! Surely it takes the brilliant minds of Apple to figure this stuff out; such keys could not possibly have been on every garbage "multimedia keyboard" since 1997?

An operating system is defined by the little things like buttons, radio buttons, tickboxes ......pop-up lists, sliders, windows, scroll bars and transparency...

No, these things have *nothing* to do with an Operating System. What is described is Window Managers, Desktop Environment, Compositing Manager etc. In other words: the graphical skins that are put *on top of* the operating system....

but it's not only about how things look, it's also about how they behave.......

Finally, the author understands it.....or does he?

The Dock, for example, has been a defining feature of OS X since the beginning......Finder became more visual.....full-screen apps..

No he doesn't! Again, all he describes is eye candy!

The article tells me nothing about how OSX, why and how it was made, what it's relation with BSD is, how it performs and so on......

An operating system is defined by the little things like buttons, radio buttons, tickboxes (or in the American lingo, checkboxes), pop-up lists, sliders, windows, scroll bars and transparency; but it's not only about how things look, it's also about how they behave.

oh really!! they teach an Operating System in made up kernel, process, threads, synch primitives, device drivers, io subsystem et.al., so all I learned was trash, sigh!!

Bias aside, ('cause, let's be honest it's impossible to report on Apple with some sort of bias) I think it's laudable for the publisher to give opportunities to young writers, say in the 3rd or 4th grade.

"And then, at the end, Steve Jobs travelled through time to the year 3010, where he fought the evil robot kings and saved the human race again."

Apple didn't "fuck" BeOS. JLG wanted way too much for the company and it's OS. People think of BeOS R5 is what Ppple passed up. They passed up a pre R1 BeOS which was miles short in networking and printing and would have taken a lot of effort to bring up to par, work Apple didn't think it was worth it for the price JLG was asking.

With NeXT they got a modern and stable OS and they got Steve Jobs. And you couldn't put a price tag on that.